Matteo Ricci - A Different Kind of Missionary

I have recently finished reading "Matteo Ricci- Le Sage Venu de L'Occident" by Vincent Cronin (a title that would sound even better in English- 'Wiseman from the West'!), which is, I suppose, appropriate given that I will be visiting China a fortnight from now. Its subject is the first Western Christian missionary to China. Not quite the first Christian missionary, but he might as well have been- the Nestorians briefly set up shop there at one point but had died out centuries before.

The book has given me a lot of food for thought.

The (very nearly successful) experiment that Ricci set out upon in his missionary work was governed by this question: Can a people be Christianised without being Westernised? Can the leaven of the Gospel be planted in an alien culture and grow without bringing with it the excrescences of the culture planting it? If one thinks about it, such a thing has almost never happened in Christian history. Certainly, as time goes on, cultures and peoples that convert to Christianity take on their own particular character. But it never begins that way. English Christianity was, from the start, unquestionably Roman. The Slavs, though able to worship in their own language thanks to the work of Cyril and Methodius, took on a very recognisably Greek Christianity.

Is there another way?

Matteo Ricci and his superior Alexander Valignano thought there was. And they were given a unique opportunity. Before them they found a culture whose essence was not fundamentally opposed to anything in Christianity. Sure, there were some questionable practices around. No Christian could countenance the widespread practice of concubinage or foot-binding. But at the heart of Chinese culture were duty, filial piety and the whole magnificent ethic of Confucius. In some ways, Chinese culture presented an even greater opportunity than that facing the first Christians who evangelised and converted the Greeks for, whereas the latter had to contend with a typically pagan pantheon whose morals were repugnant and the characteristic suspicion of the body in Greek philosophy, all of these were absent in China. It was an almost unprecedented thing. A sophisticated civilisation with a high ethic. No Dark Age barbarians who would kill you as soon as look at you here. No nomadic tribes as in South America. Nor even a high civilisation built on blood, as in Mexico. No, here was an ancient and highly civilised culture with its own Plato.

The danger of course was that unscrupulous missionaries would come in and treat the Chinese and their culture like other groups they would evangelise, either as an uncivilised group that would need to receive the equal gifts of civilisation and Christianity from the hands of the missionaries, or as a pagan civilisation that must be fought and destroyed so that a Christian civilisation might take root. This, alas, is the route most missionaries eventually took, but it was not taken by Matteo Ricci nor by his immediate Jesuit successors.

Here is a pertinent excerpt, from towards the end of Ricci's life when he has to consider the future of the mission (translated from the French as best I can):

Ricci could see from his own experience eight reasons for hope. Firstly, the miraculous progress accomplished in spite of immense difficulties seemed to prove that God looked on the development of the [Chinese] mission with a favourable eye. Secondly, since the Chinese regarded reason as the highest of all things, Christianity, a religion supported by reason, would satisfy them as much intellectually as mystically. Thirdly, books, which circulated freely in China, would permit the diffusion of an important apostolic literature. Fourthly, the Chinese, an intelligent people, were prepared to admit the superiority of Westerners in metaphysics and theology, as well as in the domains of mathematics and astronomy. Fifthly, Ricci had become convinced, thanks in large part to his study of their ancient beliefs, that the Chinese, a people pious by nature, had created for themselves a philosophy which conformed in almost every point to natural law. Sixthly, the peace which reigned in this country would permit Christianity, once established, to be maintained in a more or less permanent fashion. Seventhly, by adapting themselves to the Chinese mindset and etiquette, missionaries would certainly be known as wise and holy men. Eighthly, the doctrine of Confucius would be for them a most precious ally in their struggle against idolatrous sects [i.e. Buddhism and, to a much lesser extent, Taoism].

One of the really interesting things about all of this is the quite fundamental question, which we never find it necessary to think about: What really is of the substance of Christianity, and what are its accidents? Another book I've been reading on and off for a while is "The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys" by Andrew Louth, which has brought home to me in new and surprising ways to what extent our doctrines and our whole spiritual approach, in both East and West, depend upon Plato and those who came after him (I had hitherto no idea, for example, how vital were the foundations laid in Philo's ideas about the logos to later Christology). In Confucius, Matteo Ricci had a fascinating possibility open to him. Could he do with Confucius what the early Christian theologians had done with Plato? Could Christianity be built as solidly and fruitfully on the Chinese ethical tradition as it had been on the Greek philosophical tradition?

During his lifetime, the approach that Ricci took worked, even if it had slow beginnings. By the end of his life, he had been granted permission to live permanently in Beijing and was being inundated by Confucian mandarins, the cultural elite, and other government officials impressed and intrigued by his scholarship, ideas, skills (he was an adept clockmaker and cartographer) and religion. He had published several books, including a catechism which drew heavily on Confucius to demonstrate Christian truths.

Of course, since his death things have not turned out so well. There has been a lot of water under the bridge. The Rites Controversy, when the Church foolishly and ignorantly forbade the Chinese Christians from revering Confucius or venerating their ancestors during Qingming (thankfully rescinded, though far too late, in 1939); the whole wretchedness of colonialism, the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion; the Taiping Tianguo*; and then the unmitigated disaster that was the twentieth century, whose low point was the induced national brain-death that was the Cultural Revolution, when China's leaders sought to destroy utterly the great ethical tradition that had been the foundation of the Chinese people's culture for 2500 years.

Where to from here, for Christianity in China, or indeed for China itself?

I don't know. But I recall something that Finn Torjesen (whose organisation 'Evergreen' is carrying on a work not entirely dissimilar to Ricci's) said to me when I and some other Evangelicals visited him in China in 2003; that China is heir, as the Chinese love to boast, to a 4000 year old continuous culture and, though the last hundred years have been years of terrible upheaval, that is just a blip in their history and we don't as yet know where things will eventually settle or how the pieces will fall.

I don't know to what extent the approach or ideas of Matteo Ricci are still relevant or appropriate in modern China. Maybe there is no way to recapture the opportunities he saw, now irrevocably lost. Or maybe his ideas are the key to the future of the gospel in China. In any case, I have no doubt that he has not ceased to pray for China and the Chinese, his adopted country and people, especially over the past hundred grievous years, and will continue to do so.

*Warren Carroll, my favourite historian, is very sympathetic to the Taiping Tianguo.I find that remarkable. To me, the Taiping Tianguo epitomises the wrong-headedness of a quintessentially Western and usually Protestant approach to missions that shares, I believe, a similar error with the approach to relief practiced by too many celebrity charity workers and organisations (I'm looking at you, Bono). In the same way such organisations delight in throwing money at Africa, exacerbating the problem of poverty but enjoying the catharsis philanthropy brings, there have been and are plenty of Western missionaries and missionary organisations who delight in throwing Bibles at foreign countries and those who hail from them. I remember well as a child being invited to give money or do fundraising work to help buy Bibles for China, PNG or other such places. Imagine my shock when I eventually went to China and saw that Bibles were plentiful and easy to come by. Come to that, I find the idea that you can give a book to someone who shares almost no common cultural knowledge with you and expect him to come up with full-fledged orthodox Western Nicene Augustinian Protestant Evangelical Christianity on his own simply by reading it a laughably absurd notion. But the Taiping Tianguo shows a darker side to this approach. You may endanger someone's soul by a) not bothering to explain anything about Christianity to him first, b) not bothering to explain or try to approach agreement on the basic philosophical premises necessary to accept Christianity eg. the law of non-contradiction (not accepted by Buddhism), c) not bothering to find out even the first thing about his culture and beliefs. Endangering someone's soul in this way is bad enough. Or it could, on the other hand, lead to the deaths of millions of people (most sources say about 20 million) as when Hong Xiuquan was given a Bible out of the blue, read it and went on to carry out the biggest and bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century. There are better ways to bear witness to the gospel than this.

St Thomas Becket

An excerpt from the Christmas sermon given by Thomas Becket in T.S. Eliot's play 'Murder in the Cathedral'.


Reflect now, how Our Lord Himself spoke of Peace. He said to His disciples 'My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.' Did He mean peace as we think of it: the kingdom of England at peace with its neighbours, the barons at peace with the King, the householder counting over his peaceful gains, the swept hearth, his best wine for a friend at the table, his wife singing to the children? Those men His disciples knew no such things: they went forth to journey afar, to suffer by land and sea, to know torture, imprisonment, disappointment, to suffer death by martyrdom. What then did He mean? If you ask that, remember then that He said also, 'Not as the world gives, give I unto you.' So then, He gave to His disciples peace, but not peace as the world gives.

Consider also one thing of which you have probably never thought. Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once Our Lord's Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen. Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs. We mourn, for the sins of the world that has martyred them; we rejoice, that another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and for the salvation of men.

Beloved, we do not think of a martyr simply as a good Christian who has been killed because he is a Christian: for that would be solely to mourn. We do not think of him simply as a good Christian who has been elevated to the company of the Saints: for that would be simply to rejoice: and neither our mourning nor our rejoicing is as the world's is. A Christian martyrdom is no accident. Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man's will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity. Not so in Heaven. A martyr, a saint, is always made by the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. A martyrdom is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God. The martyr no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom. So thus as on earth the Church mourns and rejoices at once, in a fashion that the world cannot understand; so in Heaven the Saints are most high, having made themselves most low, seeing themselves not as we see them, but in the light of the Godhead from which they draw their being.

I have spoken to you today, dear children of God, of the martyrs of the past, asking you to remember especially our martyr of Canterbury, the blessed Archbishop Elphege; because it is fitting, on Christ's birth day, to remember what is that Peace which He brought; and because, dear children, I do not think I shall ever preach to you again; and because it is possible that in a short time you may have yet another martyr, and that one perhaps not the last. I would have you keep in your hearts these words that I say, and think of them at another time. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Burying the Lead

Why do we Christians shy away from the big selling points of our religion?

Last night I was helping out at the Combined Churches' 'Carols in the Park' at Warragamba, in which my parents' church is heavily involved (my minimal contribution was to assist, in an ecumenical gesture, some of the young people from my brother's Anglican church down the road, who had set up a balloon animal stall for the children). Now one would think, given that it is Advent and Christmas is on the horizon, that this would be the logical time to talk about the Incarnation.

But no.

In between carols and musical items, there was a very well done puppet show put on by a Christian group, very professional and amusing and the children lapped it up, but the puppet talked about Jesus as King, and urged the kids to 'make Him your king'. All well and good, you might say, and fair enough. Then there was a short speech/sermon by the local Anglican minister, and he consistently spoke of Jesus as 'Son of God', but never as 'God'. Nothing truly objectionable there, either, you might say, and I can't really argue with that. No one expects you to use all of Jesus' titles in a short presentation.

But the fact is there was nothing said during the whole night that couldn't have been very easily accepted by an Arian. And this bothers me.

I mean, why would we shy away from the Incarnation? Surely this is Christianity's biggest selling point? What other religion is based on the idea that God (not 'a god' from a pantheon but 'the God') became human? Nobody else has anything like that! This is a word worth preaching. So why are we reluctant to talk explicitly about it?

On the face of it, you would imagine that the more gung-ho and evangelistic of Christians would see the attractive potential of this doctrine and make it the centre-piece of their evangelistic pitch. But it almost never happens. And then we're shocked and annoyed when, at Easter, some fired-up atheist on the radio deplores Christianity's belief in 'divine child abuse'. It never occurs to us that we've left ourselves wide open to the charge by talking about Jesus the way we do.

Nor is the Incarnation the only central doctrine we tend to sideline in public. I've recently been reading this book, which restates the classic Christian ideas about eschatology and shows how far we've drifted from them in the way we tend to talk about the afterlife and the end times. Too many Christians have believed for too long in a kind of Platonic afterlife with some Christian features, and the authentically Christian endgame (the General Resurrection) has all but fallen off the map. Last night provided another example of this when our Lord's resurrection was briefly mentioned thus : "Then on Easter Sunday, Jesus came back from the dead. So, if you believe in Him, when you die, you can go to be with Him forever." I cringed at that, and imagined N. T. Wright appearing and turning over tables and chairs a la Our Lord in the Temple.

Why don't we make more of these doctrines? They are, after all, utterly unique in terms of world religions and distinctively Christian. They are also unusual in their own right and attention-grabbing. And they have some shock value, particularly in a secular Western culture that still thinks it knows all it needs to about Christianity even though it has forgotten most of what it used to know. Idiots that we are, we've put the letters page (or maybe the cartoons?) on the front page and left the lead story for page six.

Tarrawarra Abbey (or The Benefits of Monkery)

There has been something of a paucity of blogging in recent days, as no doubt some of you, my avid readers, have noticed. I will try to remedy this in the days to come.

This past week, however, I have had an EXCUSE. Yesterday, I arrived back in Sydney having recently enjoyed the hospitality of the Cistercians of Tarrawarra Abbey of Victoria (they live somewhere outside of Melbourne, in a place apparently home to a number of vineyards which I think begins with Y- as a Sydneyite I am a bit fuzzy on Victorian geography). It was my first time in a proper cloistered monastery, participating in the monkish lifestyle at least to a limited extent.

A truly wonderful place. I have returned with much food for thought. Which I thought I might share, as it's a sorry man who eats alone. Especially from a banquet table.

Two things, in fact, struck me more than anything else while I was there. Firstly, the Office.

I love the Office! More than I did before! On it goes, seven times a day, until the Psalms become a blessed blur, sanctifying every part of the day and making God present in it. All things are done within sight of God, in the continuous consciousness of His presence. He is nowhere absent. My whole day each day was sustained and nourished by His Word. The passing of each day - time itself! - becomes an act of swimming through Scripture, immersing oneself in it, letting the Word and the God Who inspired it into every nook and cranny of one's day and activities. My regular Bible reading is to that lifestyle like the difference between drinking eight glasses of water a day (the recommended dietary intake) and learning to breathe underwater.

Sleep regulation was a bit tricky (I missed Terce last Wednesday because I went to sleep while reading and was only awoken by the bell, after which it was too late) but I got better at it as time went on. I think getting up at 3:30am (or 3:45 si on peut faire vite sa toilette) and going to bed at 8:30pm would become relatively easy and routine before long. One merely needs to shift one's normal sleeping pattern a couple of hours earlier.

The other thing that struck me forcefully is the import and psychological (and spiritual) implications of the vow of stability. I'm a big fan of travelling and I love seeing new places, especially ones of historical or cultural interest. But I must admit, staying a week at Tarrawarra Abbey, praying with the monks, doing my own (albeit quite leisurely) form of work - reading, studying, writing - and having the verdant pastures and rolling hills of the Yarra Valley all about (refreshingly free of eucalypts and gloriously green), the vow of stability took on unprecedented appeal. Being in that place, the sense of time, the permanence of the monastic lifestyle, the transitoriness of the individuals who follow it strike one's soul with surprising force. The isolation of the place and the freedom from distractions, be they media, newspapers or a bustling metropolis surrounding one, induces in one a consciousness of the transitoriness of life - of one's own life especially.

On Thursday I walked down to the small cemetery they have there (after 50 years, there are fourteen monks dead) and then walked back up the path for Sext, there to pray with the living monks. The juxtaposition impressed upon me that each of those living monks has vowed to spend all his days in that place and ultimately to die there. The landscape around that they saw when they first arrived as novices is the landscape each man will see on the day he breathes his last. The very act of living there is a memento mori. And the fact that, for every monk, each day from today until his last day on earth will be spent doing essentially the same things puts the whole of life in perspective.

In the world, one tends to imagine an endless torrent of new experiences coming at one like a wet flannel, with no end in sight. There'll always be more time. The pursuit of the novel foresees no end. Until there is no more time. And sometimes even then, people grab the bull by the tail and start writing Bucket Lists. We are even prone to live like this as Christians.

The monk, on the other hand, has a different vocation from most of us. He is, in a sense, the only man who sees clearly, who looks squarely at life in its contingent nature without turning away or blinking. Since every day is basically the same, the monk can accept peacefully that every day could be his last. Maybe today he will die. Maybe he won't. Whenever his last day comes, he will spend it doing basically what he did today. The same work, the same prayers in the same place. A life lived in the sight of God.

Such lives, if they are lived thus, stand as silent witnesses to the sufficiency of Jesus Christ and to the emptiness and futility of everything else.

Pentecost

An interesting thought from "an unknown African writer from the sixth century" yesterday. Why is the gift of tongues not common among Christians as it was in the early days of the Church? Or, put another way, why do Pentecostals spout gibberish rather than becoming missionaries and speaking spontaneous Swahili?

The answer of this writer is that tongues is not just a private prayer language, much less a cool party trick, but a sign of the Church's catholicity. At the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Church was catholic and spoke all the languages of the nations. But at that point its membership was quite small, entirely Jewish and all native to Palestine. Yet that group, even given their particularity, was catholic and, through the Holy Spirit, not bound by that particularity. On Pentecost morning, a small group of Palestinian Jews encompassed the nations. In an instant, they were made participants in the divine nature, the love and life of very God roared into them and the new human race, whose head is Christ, was confected and begun. And that race is much bigger than Palestine or the Jewish people or any language and culture. It includes and enfolds them all and may be expressed equally in any.

Here is why the other instance of the gift of tongues in the Acts comes precisely at that moment when the full extent of the Church is made clear, and Gentiles are welcomed into the kingdom. Once again, tongues serves as a sign of the Church's catholicity, vindicating the faith of Cornelius and demonstrating to Peter how truly universal the Lord intends His Church to be, beyond anything that Peter himself had expected.

So why does no one speak in tongues now? This unknown African tells us. "While a single man [then], if he received the Holy Spirit, could speak in every tongue, now the one Church in its unity, which is established by the Holy Spirit, speaks in every tongue. So if anyone says to one of us, 'You have received the Holy Spirit; why do you not speak in tongues?', he should reply, 'I do speak in every tongue. For I am in the Body of Christ, the Church, which speaks in every tongue. For what did God signify by the presence of the Holy Spirit if it was not that His Church would speak in every tongue?'"

Mariaphobia

The other day, in a conversation about other things, I was met with this: "Yesterday I was driving past a Catholic church and on the roof there was a big cross but in front of it was a statue of Mary....I don't want to argue about it, but it frustrated me and I just needed to get it off my chest." Whereupon the conversation moved on.

I have often wondered where the Evangelical fear of Mary originally came from. It's an interesting historical question. You won't find it anywhere in the Reformers (the feast of Mary's Assumption was preached on by Luther after his break from Rome and continued to be practiced even in Zwingli's Zurich). Nor is it anywhere in evidence in the Anglican divines (John Pearson, who wrote polemical works about the early history of the papacy and engaged in a high profile debate against two Catholics in 1658, wrote "If Elizabeth cried out with so loud a voice, 'Blessed art thou among women' when Christ was but newly conceived in her womb, what expressions of honour and admiration can we think sufficient now that Christ is in heaven, and that mother with Him?"). Perhaps a Puritan influence? But then Pearson (unlike, say, Donne or Lancelot Andrewes) was ministering after the Restoration.

The question is of more than academic interest. Even after 6 years as a Catholic, I still find myself occasionally reacting aversely or regarding with suspicion some of the more florid Marian prayers or Marian-flavoured practices (though, interestingly, my love of the Rosary has never stopped increasing; indeed it grows the more often I pray it). I wonder sometimes if it's not some kind of neurosis; not least because this kind of Mariaphobia has surprisingly little to do with the few doctrines Catholics accept about her but Protestants reject. I know this because those doctrines made sense to me quite soon after I first applied myself to examining their merits, yet the phobic response remained and remains. Similarly for other Evangelicals I've spoken to. One can quite easily accept the Virgin Birth, the Theotokos, the Immaculate Conception, the perpetual virginity and the Assumption but still have the vague and irrational sense that God and Mary is a zero-sum game (the closer to Mary, the further from God; the closer to God, the further from Mary). The difficulty in reversing this kind of mental reflex reminds me of many atheists and agnostics I know for whom God is necessarily a tyrant intent on inhibiting people's freedom. No matter how one tries to demonstrate that such an idea of God is inaccurate (be it by rational argument, personal anecdote or any other method), the conception won't budge, until at last all one can say is, "But I know Him. He's not like that at all." Sometimes I feel like saying that about Mary, not just to others but even sometimes to myself: "I know her. She's not like that at all."

What's curious is that the suspicion attaches to Mary alone* (and is unique to modern Protestants, being unknown to any other sort of Christian, past or present). I know of a low-church Anglican parish that did a Bible study that centred, not on the Bible, but on a book by John Piper (it had a study guide and everything!). This was not seen as odd or worrying. It occurred to no one that they were focussing too much on John Piper and not enough on Jesus Christ. God and John Piper was not a zero-sum game.

Of course, it's common-sense that in order to foster one's relationship with Jesus Christ, a good thing to do is to spend time with someone who enjoys an even closer relationship with Christ than you do. But for some reason, while it makes sense to Evangelicals to treat John Piper or John Stott or Calvin or St Paul in this way, Mary doesn't make the cut. While Paul will draw you to Christ, Mary will draw you away from Him. Why? Where did this double standard come from, and why has it become so ingrained in us? It's no necessary part of Protestantism, much less Evangelicalism, and seems a peculiarly modern phenomenon. So what is its origin? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?....

I did think about the comment with which I began this post for a while after that conversation ended, not least because my initial emotional reaction was not so different from my interlocutor's. And then it occurred to me that, in fact, Mary was in front of the cross. The actual one. On Calvary. Why? Not to block other people from Christ but rather to be as close to Him as she possibly could.

Devotion to the crucified Lord and a desire for proximity to (and some form of participation in) His suffering and death ought to be something I strive after too. Most of the time it is not. A person for whom it is and was is a person with whom I could profitably associate more. The image of Mary before the Cross, then, is a challenge to me in my spiritual complacency. By drawing near to her, I draw nearer to Him. I guess I can think of worse scenes one could put on a church roof.




* Some might venture that Evangelicals feel the same about all saints, but I'm sceptical- Protestant Evangelicals do honour Christians of ages past, it's just icons and the canonisation process that make them uncomfortable- I suppose because of the papal element in the latter and the inherited vestiges of iconoclasm with the former.

A Musing on the Nature of Vocation

Perhaps it is true for many of us (might one even turn it into a general principle?) that very often we begin by desiring our vocation- it turns out that God has placed a desire for what He wills for us in our hearts from the very beginning- but that in the beginning we grasp after it for ourselves, try to take it in to our own hands, control it, make it ours. God must take it from us and make us give up all hope of ever attaining it before He can give it back to us as a true vocation, as something to which He calls us and for which He enables us, rather than something we do simply because we want to and in our own strength.

Thus Moses wants to aid his people and free them from Egyptian oppression. But "Who made you judge and prince over us?" ask the Hebrews he is trying to help. The answer, at the time the question is put, is himself. His vocation is indeed to be prince and judge over them, but it is God Who will call him to it. And when that call does come, Moses has given up any hope or expectation of doing what once he attempted when he saw one Hebrew in trouble. But there was no wrong in his desire, only in the way he sought it. He will indeed be prince and judge, and he will free his people, but not by laying hands on Egyptians. Instead he will become the very mouthpiece of God.

Likewise, in a way, with Peter. At the Supper, he enthusiastically proclaims, "I would lay down my life for You." So he shall, but not like this, for he is speaking from his own strength, and he is not nearly so strong as he thinks. It is only after his great fall, at the very time when faithfulness was most crucial, that he is humbled (indeed, humiliated) enough for Christ to give him his vocation again- in a sense, for the first time (Christ's words to him in Matthew 16 are all in the future tense)- and foretell to him his martyrdom. For martyrdom , like vocation, is a gift which one must receive rather than take. Peter will undergo it, exactly as he said he would at the Supper, but he will do so in union with Chist and not otherwise.

Ascetics Ancient and Modern

I recently found this article on Roger Ebert's blog (you know, that film critic fellow), and was fascinated by it. My fascination exists on several levels, and I thought I might try to articulate exactly what it is that fascinates me about the event the article describes.

Chris Burden, of course, is not the only man who does these kinds of bizarre things. There's also David Blaine, whom the article mentions in passing; probably the more famous for such stunts. What motivates these men to do such things? Arguably, in Blaine's case, there is a large element of vanity and desire for fame. Although, come to think of it, there must surely be easier ways to achieve fame; I can't imagine the anticipation of rousing applause and a welcoming crowd would be enough to sustain one through a 44-day long fast. Or perhaps I have underestimated the lengths some individuals will go to become famous.

With Burden, though, there is clearly something else at work. Something far more interesting. And it reminds me of nothing so much as some of the more extreme of the early monks. Not so much the Egyptian fathers, who were for the most part rigorously commonsensical and seem to have generally eschewed the more showy forms of asceticism (though they were plenty ascetical in their own way). But some of the Syrian monks, for example, did crazy things. Fasting for dangerous periods, standing for days on end, etc. The most memorable of these, of course, is St Simon Stylites, who sat up on a pillar for 39 years. To what end did these men inflict such things upon themselves? The easiest thing to do with them is dismiss them as wackos, extremists, individuals who are so far from the mainstream of their religion that it is better to ignore them and act as if they hadn't existed. But they are not so easily dismissed. People clearly looked up to them at the time. In addition to the legends of the miraculous that surround them (which the modern is also inclined to dismiss or downplay), people came from great distances to seek spiritual advice from them and they were even consulted on occasion with respect to doctrinal controversies. By all accounts, both their spiritual and doctrinal advice was impeccable- when reading about St Simon Stylites, he seems decidedly sane and, indeed, wise- except of course for the whole living-on-top-of-a-pillar thing. Likewise with Chris Burden, there's something fascinating and yet tantalisingly indefinable about him and what he does that draws people. Like with the monks, it goes beyond the mere morbid curiosity that inspired nineteenth century circus and freak shows. There is mystery in his actions. What do they mean? Because, as Ebert says, they must mean something.

As regards the monks, Simon Tugwell, the Oxford Dominican, has an intriguing answer. In writing of the monks in his book Ways of Imperfection, he suggests that they took seriously the idea that with Christ all things were made new. By taking on human nature, Christ had opened up innumerable possibilities for the human person. The severe asceticism of some of these monks, Tugwell suggests, was an almost scientific desire to see where, in this age of grace, the limits of the human person now lay.

"What [the monks] all had in common was a quest for a definition of human life independent of any definitions contained in the ordinary structures of life....The coming of Christ had reopened the fundamental question, what it means for us to be human beings. It is no longer sufficient to accept from our social milieu the values, aspirations and so on which structure our concept of ourselves; the question has to be pushed to a much further limit: 'What is a human being as such, as envisaged by the Creator?'

"It is difficult to avoid the feeling that at least some of the curious practices adopted by some ascetics were intended to be a kind of experiment, designed to extract further evidence of just what it is to be human. It is almost as if they were saying, 'Let us fast for a week and see what happens,' or 'Let us fasten ourselves to rocks and see what happens.' It is by pushing human nature to the limits of its endurance that you discover what human nature really is."

So what is Chris Burden up to? Is he tapping into something similar? Perhaps; though I suspect that he would be able to articulate what he's trying to demonstrate less well than the monks could. Of course, the theological rationale that the monks had (assuming Fr Tugwell is correct) is absent from what Burden is up to, but, given that at least in his case there appears to be no particular vanity or desire for fame in what he does, it seems reasonable to suppose that his various conceptual-art pieces are driving at similar questions. And, in this age of self-indulgence, any act of asceticism, whatever it's goal or purpose, is countercultural and, thus, impressive in a way.

St Antony in His Cave, or The Puzzle of Monasticism

Today, being Jan. 17, would ordinarily be the feast of St Antony. But this year today is Sunday, so it isn't. Still, why should that stop me venerating him and meditating on his life? Accordingly, I offer two related excerpts from the account I sent several family and friends of my own visit to St Antony's cave last October.

"Confronted by the life of Antony, my Protestant hackles go up. What kind of a response to Christ is it to flee into the desert and keep oneself away from all human contact? How does that fulfill the Great Commission? Expressions and images leap to mind- visions of fat friars, "so heavenly minded he's no earthly good" and such sayings. This instinct is strong, and has something in it. There are legitimate fears at work here- the fear that one will, through asceticism, believe one can work one's way to heaven; the fear that the obligation of evangelism will be neglected. Stereotypes of monastic and eremitical hypocrisy inevitably crowd in also.

To this there are two responses, which naturally overlap and interweave with each other.

The first is a story, one of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. There are many such stories and sayings, collected by monks in the very early days of monasticism here in Egypt, and I have made the collection of them my spiritual reading this trip, dipping into them and meditating upon them whenever I have a moment. One such story tells of three brothers, who all decided to dedicate their lives totally to Christ. The first brother decided to be a peacemaker, following Our Lord's words in Matthew 5:9 and also in mind of James 3:18. The second chose to minister to those who were ill. The third decided to go into the desert and live in quiet and solitude. After some time had passed, the first brother became frustrated, because he could not settle everyone's disputes. He went to find the second brother to see how he had fared, and discovered he was similarly frustrated, drained and emotionally exhausted from his ministering. So they both went out into the desert to find the third brother. Upon finding him, the two poured out their hearts to him with all their difficulties and asked him how he had fared. The third brother was silent for a while, and then poured some water in a bowl. "Look at the water," he said, and they did, but they couldn't see anything in it. He waited a couple of minutes and then said, "Look at the water now". They did, and could see their faces reflected in it because the water had settled and become still. The third brother said to them, "This is why you are failing in spirit. You are working in a crowd and because of the turbulence, you cannot see your own sins and faults. But if you are still, you will see your sins." Only if we see our sins, what keeps us from God, can we allow grace to work on us in those areas. As long as we cannot see those things, they will not be healed and they will sabotage whatever kind of good work we endeavour to do.

How many evangelists, taking seriously the command to preach to all men, preach to others but neglect to preach to themselves? "All men" must include myself. Far better to preach to oneself alone than to preach to others and have one's unconscious sins and faults undermine the message. Only by preaching first to myself will I prevent myself from preventing God saving those I meet.

But, it will be protested, such a way of life, if undertaken seriously and rigorously, would prevent any real evangelism from taking place. If the serious Christians go out into the desert or off into the woods alone to live by working and praying in solitude and quiet, what will happen to those who have never heard the Gospel? Where will the missionaries come from?

That brings us to the second response to such questions. It is a simple recognition of an undeniable historical fact, and it is this. Almost all the peoples of Western Europe (and many in the East as well) were converted by monks.

This is simply a fact. The conversion of the Franks was set on foot when St Remigius preached to and baptised King Clovis. He was a Benedictine monk. St Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with St Augustine of Hippo) began and made great progress towards the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in England. His entire missionary team was composed of monks. St Boniface preached in the north of Germany and his mission had great success. He was also a Benedictine monk, hailing from a monastery near Winchester. In the East, Sts Cyril and Methodius began the conversion of the Slavic people, and Cyril's name is still attached to the alphabet he created to translate the Scripture into the Slavic language- it is called Cyrillic, and those are the letters you see on all those Russian signs. They were also monks. Nor should it be forgotten that it was principally because of the efforts of Benedictine monks, such as Dunstan, Aethelwold, and my good friend Aelfric, that the Faith was renewed in England after the wars with the Danes.

How is this to be explained? How does one reconcile the nature of the monastic lifestyle with such successful missionary efforts? How can something that begins with a man following Christ by running out into the desert to live away from people end with masses of people accepting Christ and whole cultures being drenched in the Gospel (in most of these countries, the people and the culture are only now, more than a millenium later, beginning to lose their faith- I'd call that some successful evangelism!)?

I don't have any easy answers to those questions. Indeed, it is something I am still digesting and mulling over. Part of the answer lies, I think, with the story above. So eager to get out there and win the world for Christ, we have not taken the time to let grace get its claws into us. Thus we sabotage ourselves. There is another story about a man who declared that he was completely sanctified and, taking Matthew 5:48 as his text, said that in Christ he had been made perfect. One of the monks went to visit him and asked him if he had really said this. He replied that he had. So the monk asked him, "Suppose you came in here and found a woman on your mat. Could you speak to her as though she was not a woman?" The man said, "No, but I would resist any temptation and refrain from touching her." The monk said, "Then you are not perfect. You have imprisoned lust but it is still in you. But suppose you were walking along and saw some stones on one side of the road and a jar of gold on the other. Could you think they were the same value?" The man said, "No, but I would resist any temptation and leave the gold where it was." The monk said, "Then you are not perfect. You have imprisoned greed but it is still in you. But suppose one man loved you and spoke well of you and another man hated you and slandered you, and suppose they both came to visit you one day, would they both be equally welcome to you?" The man replied, "No, but I would force myself to treat them the same." The monk said, "Then you are not perfect. You have imprisoned vanity, but it still lives in you. Your passions have been conquered but they have not been redeemed."

Another part of the answer, illustrated to some extent by the above story, lies in this. One of the things that strikes one about the monks is their total realism. Not for them lofty and abstract theological concepts. Grace, redemption and the work of Christ are found in the nitty-gritty. Sin is not a concept, an idea. It is a lived reality to be recognised and fought against intelligently, and sometimes one wins and sometimes one loses. Solitude and quiet are the prerequisites of self-knowledge, so you can know how sin gets at you specifically, and thus where grace is needed. The monastic lifestyle forces one to be honest. And only when we are honest about ourselves can we stand before God and let Him have His way with us. As long as we hide from ourselves, even subconsciously, we will also, like Adam, hide from God.

Another story tells of how a man tried to make a donation to a hermit. The hermit refused, saying, "I have enough for my needs from the work that I do." The man insisted, saying, "Then you could give the money to the poor," but the hermit refused even more vehemently, saying, "Then I should sin doubly. I would have accepted what I do not need, and then be vain from doing a good deed." That kind of moral realism, sprung from self-knowledge, is highly to be prized. To recognise that externals are ephemeral, and that whatever leads my soul to God, no matter what it is, should be sought, and whatever leads my soul away from God, no matter what it is, should be shunned.

I do not think these are the whole answer to this paradox, but they are clues.

What then, in a related set of questions, are we to make of Protestantism's traditional ambivalence towards monasticism? Of course, part of that no doubt owes something to Martin Luther's own experience of it as a bed of legalism and a hindrance to his relationship with Christ. That experience, being part of the foundational narrative of Protestantism, has, I suspect, been formative. There is also the general stereotype of monks (particularly during the Reformation period) being hypocrites, engaging in sinful and lewd lifestyles while putting forth a veneer of piety and devotion, entering the monastery because they were lazy and didn't want to work (the Desert Fathers would, one imagines, have stern words for such men), etc. It is undoubtable that these stereotypes, though open to the charge that many exceptions existed, had some foundation in reality during that period. One has only to read a little of the troubles Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross had in reforming the Carmelites in the same period to realise that monasticism was not in particularly good shape in the sixteenth century. And again, as that era was Protestantism's formative period, its birth and childhood, the contours of the culture of the time have characterised it to some extent ever since.

But I suspect it goes deeper even than that. The sixteenth century has been and gone. From an historical perspective it ought to be clear, especially in Evangelicalism whose origins are later than Protestantism more broadly defined, that monasticism as a way of life has a particular dynamic to it and that the abuses and dodginess widespread in the sixteenth century and afterwards are not of its essence. So why, apart from a few Anglican efforts which are clearly lifted pretty directly from Catholicism (the Anglican Franciscans leap to mind), has Protestantism not given rise to any monastic movements of its own? Is there a particular reason why it should, alone of all forms of Christianity, excise from itself a lifestyle that has proved vigorous, dynamic and gospel-centred in every other branch of Christians?

This is something I have wondered about for some time, primarily as simply an historical curiosity. I don't think I have a definite answer but I have some suspicions which may be more or less on the mark. I submit them for what they are worth.

It seems to me that Protestantism, particularly Evangelicalism, has a very specific understanding and practice of prayer. Prayer is there to get things done. All forms of prayer are subordinate to, and converge towards, petitionary prayer. One can see this in the kind of language used. The standard kind of opening, "Lord, we just want to praise You and thank You..." or "Lord, we are so blessed to be able to come into Your presence..." naturally leads to sentences beginning with verbs like 'help', 'use', 'allow', etc. All very active. Lord, do stuff! I should add, in case there is any doubt, that this is a perfectly legitimate kind of prayer and I am not criticising it, much less condemning it. But what I find interesting is that for Protestantism generally, and Evangelicalism in particular, this is the whole of prayer. And this naturally leads to an inherent suspicion of all kinds of prayer that do not have as their stated objective the intention of getting something done.

I think this idea of prayer is the basis for much that is good in Protestant culture. The gung-ho, pro-active "Let's win some souls for Christ!", "Let's church the unchurched!", "Let's reach out to the lost!", "Let's let our good works shine before men so that they praise our Father in heaven!", "Let's make Sydney 10% Christian by 2015!" attitude is laudable and challenging to those of other Christian cultures who are unused to such in-your-face Christianity.

But for those raised in such an atmosphere, monasticism constitutes a blindspot. "You can't cut yourself off from everybody. That's not biblical." "Following Christ means bearing witness to the good news in your home, in your workplace, not leaving everything behind and doing nothing on your own." For all of these objections, my suspicion is that the fundamental problem is that monasticism doesn't seem active enough. I recall a seminar offered once in the Sydney Uni Evangelical Union. The advertisement ran thus: "GET THEE TO A NUNNERY! Or, for a serious discussion of Christian femininity, come to the Women's Forum on Thursday at 1pm." The implication was that doing manual work, praying, and singing Psalms every day in an enclosed community was no way to be a Christian woman.Why not? At the risk of completely misreading the intentions of whoever came up with the advertisement, I would hazard a guess that it was because such a lifestyle appeared ineffective. It didn't affect anything. With no evangelistic or other outlet for outreach of some sort, the nunnery looks rather like hiding your light under a bushel. The scandal of that approach is that, with the Great Commission firmly embedded in her mind and heart, a person who takes up such a lifestyle seems to be opting out. Shirking her God-given responsibilities as a Christian.

There may, of course, be more to it than I have suggested, but I think that this dedication to what is outwardly and explicitly active and effective, this results-driven spirituality, is at least a large part of Protestantism's historic distrust of the monastic way of life. There may be more to it than that, and I may not be completely on the mark with that hypothesis. But its something to think about anyway.

To ingrained objections like these, the only thing to say is what I pointed out before- those two responses from earlier. Firstly, grace cannot work on sins of which we are unconscious and, unless we have the experience of being quiet and alone, engaging in contemplative as well as active prayer (i.e. prayer that does not seek to get things done but simply to know God), we will not see our sins nor will they be cured and they will sabotage all our efforts. Secondly, the counter-intuitive but undeniable fact that monks have been more successful and more effective missionaries and evangelists than anyone else to date."

- - - - - - -

"To our right, leading up and behind one of the large formations of rock that characterised the mountain, we saw a set of steps. This, we assumed, must be the way to Antony's cave. So we left Ahmet with the car and began to climb. Having reached the top of these steps, we realised that an error of judgement had been made. We had assumed that the cave must be just beyond this rise. Having reached the top of it, however, and therefore being able to see farther than before, we perceived that in fact the steps led halfway up the great massif, and that we had a long way to go. Moreover, we had not brought any water with us.

With an ever-so-slight devil-may-care attitude, Tanta Suzie, Jeanne and I decided to continue up anyway. We wanted to see Antony's cave. Well, we would see Antony's cave! So the climb began.

There were actually huge numbers of people going up and down the mountain. Interestingly, every one of them was Egyptian and almost all of them were young. Coptic Christianity is clearly doing pretty well these days. To either side of the steps as we climbed were little plaques stuck into the ground, each featuring a verse of Scripture or one of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers in Arabic. Tanta Suzie was kind enough to translate a couple of these for Jeanne and myself. The climb was maybe half the distance that the Steps of Repentance had been on Sinai (I found out later it was 1200 steps) and not as gruelling as the climb up Sinai had been. But it was still fairly gruelling, especially given that we had not brought water...

Eventually, after a good 45 minutes, we reached the small area where Antony's cave was. There was a precipice at its edge, and a tall fence had been built to prevent any accidents. The rockface stretched up from where we were more or less vertically, though in one small crevice one could see a Coptic cross placed, and in another one could see pigeons nesting (the first animals we had seen in the area- it is after all in the middle of the desert). Around the cave were quite a number of people, mostly young. One group of young men from a church in Cairo were eager to get a group photo with the curiously-dressed Westerner, and, slightly reluctantly, I obliged them. It was, at any rate, a good opportunity to practice my Arabic, much to their delight and occasional amusement.

The cave itself was tiny. A small gap in the rockface, nothing more. In gaps and small crevices in the rock around the entrance, pieces of paper had been placed with prayers inscribed, as at the Burning Bush at St Catherine's. And around the entrance on the ground were shoes and sandals belonging to those who had entered. The concept of going barefoot in holy places a la Moses is still very much alive among the Copts.

Jeanne and I went in, but Tanta Suzie, who was not feeling the best after the climb, decided to wait outside. It was, as I said, nothing but a crack in the rockface. I mean that literally. There was no floor as such and not enough space to stand, just two walls of rock that curved narrowly on either side, meeting in a sharp point below one's feet (or foot, as it was often too narrow to put both feet down at once) and the same again a short space above one's head. One was forced to half-crawl, half-skip, half-walk (yes, I know that makes three halves but one-third sounds odd) in order to progress, and this became even more interesting as the daylight faded behind and one became enveloped in darkness as the cave bent away and into the mountain. Someway in, it opened out to a space that was a little larger and where there were candles to give some light. There were a couple of steps down and there an altar, with one of those Bedouin mats laid out in front of it. Above the altar was an icon of St Antony and above that a larger icon of Our Lord. I thought that was as it should be. There was a man who came in with us and stood at the top of the steps where the cave opened out a bit. He spoke to us and gave us some background on the place, but, being in Arabic, I was only able to grasp a small part of what he was saying.

I knelt there for a while, praying, asking for Antony's prayers, and meditating on the significance of the place. Looking around and up at the cave walls, with the candle-light flickering and casting shadows among the formations in the cave ceiling, it was extraordinary to think that Antony had lived here for years, on his own in the dark. Getting to know himself truly. Getting to know God truly. Letting grace chip away at him bit by bit. How familiar these rock walls must have become to him. And yet how lonely. How far away from everything. This niche in a cliff-face was miles out into the desert, far from anything. Dangerous to live here. So little to sustain even basic necessities. What kind of happiness or fulfillment could a man find here? No one to talk to. Surely a person would go mad, like those people one hears about isolated on islands for years. Yet Antony did not go mad. In fact, the opposite. He became sane, saner than most anybody else around, so that people would travel out into the desert to get spiritual counsel and advice from him. Holiness and sanity are related, as Frank Sheed reminds us, because they both involve living in accordance with reality, a reality that ultimately derives from and consists in God. Far from going mad, Antony's relationship with the Lord made him into the kind of man that could ease the sufferings of the whole Christian population under Diocletian, and build up and encourage the orthodox in their struggle with the Arians.

It was not right to flee the world and isolate himself in the desert, cry the critics. It was not right to flee the world and isolate himself in the desert, cry my own spiritual instincts. What good did it do? demand both.

Ask that of the Alexandrian Christians under Diocletian. Ask that of Athanasius and the orthodox during the Arian crisis. Ask that of the Anglo-Saxons, of the Franks, of the tribes of northern Germany, of the Slavs. Ask that of the Coptic young people who climbed the mountain yesterday and placed their prayers in the rocks. Ask that of the Patriarch of Alexandria at prayer in his chapel. "Go, sell all you have and give it to the poor and come, follow Me."

I also thought of something else, which I had been thinking about since Sinai. It had always seemed to me that Moses got a rather raw deal. All those years of working, all those years of wandering. But no pay-off. The Israelites get their reward, their homecoming. They finally enter the Promised Land. But Moses, after everything, doesn't get a thing. It seems so unfair. Where is his happy ending? Shouldn't God reward him after all his faithfulness, his tireless work, his sacrifices? But then I realised. What am I expecting or wanting for Moses? I'm wanting something for him that God will give him. A crown, a sense of fulfillment, some kind of closure, something. But Moses has learnt the most important lesson, and I'm one step behind even grasping what that is- Moses has learnt to desire God Himself, in preference to any of His gifts. God Himself is Moses' reward at the end of his life. That is his only closure. That is all the closure he needs. All Moses' experiences have led up to that and it is that that is the essence of the Torah - "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength." - and it is that that Moses finally learns to desire on the mountain when he says "Show me Your glory." The Israelites have received their home, their land, a place for themselves. But they have not learned to desire God simply in Himself, and thus they will continue to fall from Him for centuries to come. Moses has learnt this. He has come to desire God simply for Himself. So, for him, the Promised Land is superfluous. In the desert, Antony learned to desire the same thing."

Adventine Thoughts

I love Advent!

It's moments like these I wish I had prepared better for the season beforehand. To be honest, I didn't prepare myself particularly well at all this year, and so here it is the second week and I'm only just beginning to get in an appropriate frame of mind. It makes me wish Advent was longer (even most Lents I don't start really seeing any spiritual benefits in my life until the last week or two - the old ανθρωπος is stubborn).

Still, the season is so rich (and so sadly neglected and often ignored). And it fits one's experience no matter what is going on in one's life.If one finds oneself in adversity, Advent lifts one's cries of desperation and pleading onto a higher plane, plugging you into the long trials of Israel, and reminding you of the fact that we still await the day when Jesus Christ shall return and at last put all to rights. The spirit of the season is perfectly encapsulated in the Kyrie eleison, the cry of the beggar, the cry of the drowning man, the cry of one in desperate straits for whom all other helps have failed. Advent promises deliverance. He will come to your aid at last; only wait and you will see.

On the other hand, if one is in a good place in one's life, if one finds oneself at the centre of God's will, and content, Advent puts before us the blessed expectation, the joy of imminent ineffable delight. The air is thick with excitement, like the days before a wedding, like waiting in line for the premiere of a film of whose story one has been a longtime fan. Joy beyond all imagining, glory and beauty yet unseen lie around the corner, with which nothing in our present experience can compare, for which nothing in our present experience can prepare us. He is coming. Or rather, He is coming back. And "the sufferings of this present time [will not be] worth comparing with the glory which shall be revealed in us." (Rom 8:18)

Tonight, the first reading (which I got to read- woot!) was from Baruch. Basically the whole of chapter 5. In the face of total disaster, the conquest, the exile, Baruch gives a prophecy of gradually increasing exultation, a crescendo of joy. All of these griefs will pale. God will bring the people back. They shall serve Him in truth. It is from the perspective of the ruined city herself, a prophecy that she should look out because all those who went out from her in disgrace shall return in glory. The expectation is palpable. "Arise, Jerusalem. Stand on high. Look to the east."

Then we have John the Baptist in the gospel. Out he comes from the desert. Back into society from his near lifelong exile from the company of men. But he has a message. And it is, in some ways, the same as Baruch's. God is coming. Get ready. You will soon see what He will do.

After the sermon, we appropriately had this hymn, which I love (in particular I like the third verse):

On Jordan's Bank the Baptist's Cry"by Charles Coffin,
1676-1749

1.
On Jordan's bank the Baptist's cry
Announces that the Lord is nigh;
Come, then, and hearken, for he brings
Glad tidings from the King of kings.

2. Then cleansed by every breast from sin
Make straight the way for God within;
Prepare we in our hearts a home
Where such a mighty guest may come.

3. For You are our salvation, Lord,
Our refuge, and our great reward.
Without Your grace we waste away
Like flow'rs that wither and decay.

4. To heal the sick, stretch out Your hand
And bid the fallen sinner stand;
Shine forth, and let Your light restore
Earth's own true loveliness once more.

5. To Him Who left the throne of heav'n
To free mankind, all praise be giv'n;
Like praise be to the Father done,
And Holy Spirit, Three in One.

Fantastic stuff!

On Receiving Communion

I am not a big fan of receiving the Flesh of Christ in one's hand at Communion. I make a practice of receiving Him directly into my mouth as a rule, which strikes me personally as a more fitting and respectful manner, and for me to refrain from doing so or to change my practice would be to demonstrate a diminishment of reverence on my part. This is, of course, an act of personal devotion to Jesus. It does not (or should not) cause me to judge the devotion or love for Jesus of those who do differently.

Of course, there are numbers of people who would regard the method of reception as some kind of a quasi-litmus test of devotion or, alternatively, suggest that abolishing the possibility of receiving the Lord's Flesh in one's hand at Communion would naturally increase people's reverence for Him. This is, I think, a potentially insidious temptation and an unhelpful way of thinking. Our bodies and our actions do, of course, communicate something of our attitudes. That is the element of truth in such persons' mentality. But bodies and actions are not an infallible indicator. And there is not always a causal effect from one to the other or vice versa. Acts of personal devotion are frequently precisely that- personal- and that which communicates or demonstrates something profound in the heart of one believer may leave another cold.

For those who think that somehow such things are a natural consequence (or, worse, a cause) of a general loss of a sense of awe and reverence before the Almighty over the last several decades, hear the words of St Cyril of Jerusalem, who could hardly be accused of a lack of reverence for the Holy Flesh and Blood of the Saviour:

Approaching, do not come with your palms stretched flat nor with fingers separated. But making your left hand a seat for your right, and hollowing your palm, receive the Body of Christ, responding Amen. And having with care hallowed your eyes by the touch of the Holy Body, take it, vigilant lest you drop any of it. For should you lose any of it, it is as though you were deprived of a member of your own body.

What would be to me a symptom of irreverence was to St Cyril quite the opposite. A very small minority would question the orthopraxis of a bishop who gave this advice today. But they would be wrong. It is good that the Church has instituted options for the faithful in this regard, rather than conforming us to an absolute and monolithic expression of worship. When I receive the Body of my Saviour, I may express devotion to Him in a way that seems fitting to me; someone else to whom such actions have no such significance is able to express the same devotion in a different way. It is then for me not to judge people's love and desire for God merely by whether or not they conform to how I naturally express these things. "For man looks at the outward appearance but the LORD looks at the heart." (1 Sam 16:7) And it is by our hearts, mine and theirs, that we shall be judged.

St Augustine

Urged to reflect upon myself, I entered under your guidance the innermost places of my being; but only because you had become my helper was I able to do so. I entered, then, and with the vision of my spirit, such as it was, I saw the incommutable light far above my spiritual ken and transcending my mind: not this common light which every carnal eye can see, nor any light of the same order; but greater, as though this common light were shining much more powerfully, far more brightly, and so extensively as to fill the universe. The light I saw was not the common light at all, but something different, utterly different, from all those things. Nor was it higher than my mind in the sense that oil floats on water or the sky is above the earth; it was exalted because this very light made me, and I was below it because by it I was made. Anyone who knows truth knows this light.

O eternal Truth, true Love, and beloved Eternity, you are my God, and for you I sigh day and night. As I first began to know you, you lifted me up and showed me that, while that which I might see exists indeed, I was not yet capable of seeing it. Your rays beamed intensely on me, beating back my feeble gaze, and I trembled with love and dread. I knew myself to be far away from you in a region of unlikeness, and I seemed to hear your voice from on high: “I am the food of the mature: grow, then, and you shall eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me”.

Accordingly I looked for a way to gain the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is also God, supreme over all things and blessed for ever. He called out, proclaiming I am the Way and Truth and the Life, nor had I known him as the food which, though I was not yet strong enough to eat it, he had mingled with our flesh, for the Word became flesh so that your Wisdom, through whom you created all things, might become for us the milk adapted to our infancy.

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!
Lo, you were within,
but I outside, seeking there for you,
and upon the shapely things you have made
I rushed headlong – I, misshapen.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
They held me back far from you,
those things which would have no being,
were they not in you.
You called, shouted, broke through my deafness;
you flared, blazed, banished my blindness;
you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you;
I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;
you touched me, and I burned for your peace.


Today is a hopeful day for sinners. Today we are reminded that the chief of sinners (in Bunyan's phrase) is in heaven. If God's grace can do that, there is hope for the worst of us.

Kiran has a nice reflection here.

The Martyrs of 64

Another day, another feast. Yet the subject matter of these two days is monumental and worth pausing over. Yesterday, we commemorated the martyrdom of Peter and Paul. Today, of all the Christians who were martyred with them in the first great persecution of the Church.

In his gardens across the Tiber by the Vatican hill, near where Peter had probably lived when he first came to Rome 22 years before, Nero held the circus games which could no longer be held in the two great amphitheatres, damaged in the fire. During those games in the fall of 64, many of the Christians whom Nero's police had arrested were thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. Others were dressed in clothing soaked in pitch and sulfur and lit as human torches along the Appian Way, as Nero raced by in his chariot.

- Warren Carroll, The Founding of Christendom, p424

New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst, but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve around them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

- G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p197

This feast is, perhaps, the first largescale revelation of Christianity in its purest essence. Following Christ means that you end up going where Christ went, to the cross, the gallows, the guillotine, the arena. The natural end of the Christian path is love pouring out its lifeblood. This is the triumph of the Cross. This is the imitation of Christ. This is Christianity in its natural state. All other expressions merely point towards it. And, ultimately, this is how the world is redeemed, by the Body following its Head, by diabolical hatred expending all its energy to extinguish divine love, and divine love sacrificing itself for the love of its killers and becoming all the stronger thereby. This is how Christianity wins the world, not by war or persuasion or social programs or being nice to people. The dark days of 64AD set the step of the Church's march through history which was first established on Calvary. Islam may win lands and peoples to itself through war and conquest. Christianity will win them by the blood of men and women who give up their lives freely for love of their Lord.

Sexual Authenticity

Just today I finished reading this book by Melinda Selmys.

As someone with more than one openly gay colleague, the book caught my eye when I saw it advertised in the latest catalogue of my local Catholic bookshop. On a whim, when I was there a couple of days later picking up another volume, I bought it. I am very glad I did.

Melinda Selmys is one of those rare people who does not begin an apologetic with her guard up. I have noticed this about converts of almost any sort (even in myself) - there is a reflex to go on the defensive. Perhaps because at one point there was war within oneself, speaking of the issues again revives that quasi-military mode of the mind. There are truths to be defended, errors to be refuted, cases to be proved. In the midst of this, it is tragically easy to forget that there are persons involved (all the more so because, when one first fought these battles it was solely within oneself, so there were no other people to worry about, only ideas battling bravely against one another), so love can get lost amid the truth. This is a great temptation in any work of apologetics, especially for converts of whatever sort.

Melinda Selmys' work is refreshingly free of such things. She brings the benefits of experience and personal insight to the issues she talks about, but also understanding liberated from opprobrium and platitudes. For this reason, what she says, though she says it gently, is that much more persuasive. And there are some fascinating insights in this book.

Several things stood out for me, which I will enumerate.

1. Selmys strikes a tricky but refreshing balance on the issue of identity. On the one hand, she calls into question the stark Us and Them felt by both gays and straights. She suggests that in fact, although certain individuals may be temperamentally disposed towards compulsive same-sex acts, homosexuality per se is possible for anybody- thus the division of humanity into 'gay' and 'straight' is misleading. This is discomfiting for both parties- gays because their firm self-identification as such is not as airtight as might have been wished; Christians because the ick factor many feel so strongly is no guarantee that they are immune to this particular temptation. On the other hand, Selmys strongly affirms that the identity issue is not a smokescreen- that identity is necessarily bound up in the way we relate to those around us, especially those to whom we have bound ourselves (whether those ties be romantic, familial, or whatever) and that to call into question the basis for those relationships and the choices that led to them is no light matter.

2. Selmys, from her own experience, suggests that trying to make gays straight i.e. trying to get individuals with same-sex attraction to be attracted to the opposite sex, is in the end kind of pointless, even if it works. She cites her own experience where her encounter with God and conversion to Christianity came first, and it was only later that she found herself ready to marry and have children.

3. Selmys gives a basic outline of the history of thinking about sex in the Church, ending with a basic (but quite decent) outline of the Theology of the Body. She looks honestly at the general suspicion with which sex has been viewed by Christians without trying to justify or make excuses for that view (I was particularly interested to read her take on certain saints whom I was obliged to study for my Honours thesis eg. several canonised couples who took vows of continence within marriage, or virgin martyrs who refused to get married). She regards the Theology of the Body as a vital intellectual and theological project by the Church which is long-overdue.To suggest that the Church had, for a long time, dropped the ball on this issue (because it genuinely saw other things as being far more important) but had recently begun to take it seriously was a welcome thought. Most folk I know, depending on which side of the fence they're on, would claim either that the Church never dropped the ball in the first place and that TOTB was the outworking of something which had been brewing for centuries, or that the Church just generally misunderstands sex and will never understand it until it abolishes celibacy/institutes priestesses/allows contraception/allows premarital sex/allows homosexuality/insert pet dissent here. Melinda Selmys introduces some welcome balance and perspective.

4. I was deeply challenged, in light of my own vices (and I shall say no more than that), by this idea: Selmys, who is also a poetic type, mentioned several times throughout the book the extent to which fantasy supported and dominated her relationship with her lesbian lover. Later, she writes beautifully of the glory of sub-creation, as Tolkien called it; of the ability of an artist or poet or writer to bring into being creatures, characters, with the innner consistency of reality, who seem to take on a life of their own, who have their own personalities, their own quirks, their own lovable idiosyncrasies. But there is a danger in this. "An artist creates characters, nourishes them within her own mind, allows them a little breath of her own free will, and transcribes them in a flesh of words or paint. She does not marry them. She does not raise them to her own level, and try to form a union of soul and mind with them...[t]he risk, whether with imaginary or physical promiscuity, is a fragmentation of personality...if you wed yourself to a host of your own creations, to the lesser fragments of your own psyche that populate your sexual fantasies, you lose the centre and core of your being. It becomes like a pulverised mirror, returning a more and more shattered image until, at last, it is dust and reflects nothing at all."

5. I was particularly gratified and decidedly moved at one particular point of her testimony. Selmys speaks at one point of coming to accept that Someone was directing things behind the scenes of her life and of the desire to know this Someone so as to thank Them. So she began to pray, to seek after this Person. All the while, she was secretly hoping that the Someone would be female, that she might after all get a goddess to worship. Sure enough, after some time she felt a distinctly female presence responding to her prayers. For a moment, she thought she might get her desire. But a moment of confusion. For some reason, Selmys felt the proper form of address for this entity ought to be 'Virgin' and 'Mother'. And, bizarrely, this feminine personality seemed to be nudging her, pointing her toward something else, beyond itself. With a shock, the realisation came- this was no goddess. This was Mary. And if Mary, the something else she was nudging her towards must be Jesus Christ.

This testimony moves me particularly, not least because of my decidedly rocky, on-again off-again relationship with the Mother of my Lord. It delights me also, for two reasons. (i) It gives the lie to all that Protestant nonsense about Mary as a goddess. Even someone who has imbibed the various ideas of New-Agey feminism, when they finally get to meet her, can tell the difference in an instant. (ii) The Blessed Mother's life is and remains wholly referred. Intellectually, I know perfectly well that Mary herself, everything she has ever done and everything the Church has ever said about her is ultimately about Jesus. But still, the suspicion lingers in the blood that it is not so. It is delightful to have the contrary confirmed, especially by someone who didn't know a thing about it either way and who would have liked very much for it to be otherwise.

In conclusion, this is among the best books on Christian sexual ethics I have read and is certainly the best book on homosexuality I have come across. I highly recommend it.

A Thought or Two on the Modern Malaise

Recently, I found this quote by the great Baptist preacher, C.H. Spurgeon:

The sharpest pangs we feel are not those of the body, nor those of the estate, but those of the mind...The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity, but a wounded spirit who can bear?...You may have no outward cause whatever for sorrow, and yet if the mind be dejected, the brightest sunshine will not relieve your gloom.
(Sermons Vol. 11)

I think that pretty well sums up the modern malaise, especially amongst youth. Nothing particularly wrong, but the spirit is dark, haunted and broken. It reminds me of something Cardinal Pell said in an interview a while back. The reporter asked him how the young people could be expected to cope with the modern world being in the mess its in. The good Cardinal replied something like, "That's rubbish! Young people in Australia have never had it better! They've never been through a war. They've never been poor or hungry. They can find jobs without very much trouble. Education is not only possible but compulsory. Cope with what?"

That is precisely the question. If our culture expects that external and material needs are what will make one happy (and every TV advertisement proclaims as much), then why when all of these are fulfilled are the people not happy? Or is there something we're missing, something that both Cardinal Pell and Spurgeon know about but which the bulk of our culture has forgotten?

Touched by God

I have recently been digging into this book- a collection of testimonies of people who have taken up Benedict's call to follow hard and fast after God by entering the monastery. It is a fascinating and challenging read.

A number of things emerge strikingly from it. Here's one.

One of the most common experiences that every person in the book describes in some form is a period of intense difficulty that seems generally to begin in the novitiate (though not always) and reaches a supreme intensity in the years after Solemn Profession (when the monk/nun makes a total and irrevocable commitment to monastic life, like marriage vows). Each person who has written in this book speaks of a point where it all became too much, where they felt empty, depressed, utterly alone; felt that they might have made a mistake in choosing this life, that, in short, they needed out. For the reader, they certainly don't paint the monastic life in very flattering colours. It appears ruthless and demanding, like the army, maybe worse.

I know that there was a mass exodus from the various monasteries and Orders in the 60s and 70s, which is when most of these folk entered it, and one expects to hear such things from people who did leave. What makes these testimonies interesting is that each of these individuals stayed. For some it was a near thing. But God beckoned each of them on in different ways, and each of them made the choice not to abandon Him or their vows. One man took up an offer to study theology in Rome for three years, and through that whole experience returned to the monastery with his faith and his monastic vocation revivified. One lady did leave but had to go back to pick up some things, heard the sisters singing Vespers, and in that moment remembered the vow she had taken, the longing to surrender herself totally to seeking after God and realised that she could never really live contentedly elsewhere. One man took up a post as parish priest in which he served for seven years. Only then, after he had seen what it was all in aid of, was he ready to take up his monastic calling to the full.

At least one of the writers submitted that that period of utter desolation is what St John of the Cross means when he talks about the 'dark night of sense', that point that a person reaches where God makes the offer to them of loving Him for Himself simply, and not for any of His gifts; and so all the gifts are removed for a time and the soul left to grope after God, and eventually find Him, with no external incentive apart from Himself and that only. I have never experienced that, although I think two years ago I may have experienced something which approached it, albeit for a couple of weeks, not years at a time. The prospect is a scary one. One does not get many warm fuzzies reading these testimonies. But our faith is a relationship and it is proper that it should have these elements. We are called to love a Person. More than that, we are called to love Him the same way He loved us. And, if we take a moment to look at the Cross, we realise there was absolutely no external incentive for Him to love us. He loved us while we were still sinners, in the midst of our sin, and even had the creative audacity to use our sin to redeem us, though at the cost of His own life.

Why did the martyrs go to their deaths rejoicing? Why did Francis exult in giving up everything he could think of? Why did Anthony run to the desert? Precisely to reflect that extraordinary love in their own lives and, more than that, to live in that love; to become a diamond in which that light is captured, reflected and beamed forth anew.

Its a demanding relationship. It demands death. Actual death- with blood- or, failing that, the long, hard living death that stretches on for decades, that involves the sacrificial burning of our dreams, our desires, of all that we hold dear so that we may have, know and love Christ.

I become more and more convinced that we need to take this kind of relationship with God (for actually this is the only kind He offers us) deadly seriously. We live in a culture rife with hypocrisy, full of unfulfilled promises and salespitches. The saying by St Francis- "Preach the gospel at all times; use words when necessary"- is sometimes trotted out to relieve us of the responsibility of preaching the gospel with words. This is, I think, to misunderstand it. I do believe there is a lot of preaching with words that falls empty to the ground, even if well-intentioned. This does not, however, relieve us of the responsibility of bearing witness. On the contrary. But so much of our witness proves a counter-witness because our lives tell against it. People will only stand up and take notice when we look like what we're talking about. And that requires- REQUIRES- death. I suspect that there are times when it is actually easier to preach with words than not. To preach with our lives is well nigh impossible. Why? Because, well, at the end of the day, we don't want to die.

It is for this reason that I begin to get an inkling of why, in the second great Christian evangelistic push, after the Roman Empire fell, it was the monks who succeeded in converting whole nations, including most of those which are now sliding inexorably into a post-Christian malaise (eg. England, France, Germany, etc.). Every skerrick of the monk's life demands death; and every skerrick is a pull, an impulse, a tug towards the extraordinary love of God incarnated in Jesus Christ. Take a dozen lives formed in that kind of crucible by that kind of lifestyle and plant them in a pagan nation that has never heard the gospel before and things will happen!

This is why I begin to realise how necessary the monastic vocation is in our own time. Monasteries are not just powerhouses of prayer (although we certainly need them to be that too- nothing is more powerful than prayer and Christians who don't see the point of monks and nuns simply haven't understood what Scripture teaches about prayer); they are powerhouses of evangelism. Our post-Christian culture will always be able to dismiss Christians as hypocrites who don't believe in what they're selling as long as we allow ourselves to be merely singed by the Holy Spirit's fire, rather than burned up. Monks and nuns are there to show us, and the non-Christian world, what the latter is supposed to look like.

Islam and the Victorious Defeat of God

I had an encounter with one of my Muslim students the other day where we spoke of what we each believed about Jesus Christ.

Being a student of history, I (unlike most of the Western world it seems) have not been unaware of the inherent military nature of Islam and the eternal antagonism between it and Christendom, nor yet under the illusion that that antagonism is likely to disappear anytime soon, even if Christendom has lost its faith and the Islamic world most of its teeth. Nevertheless, it was startling to me to be brought face to face and confronted with the source of that antagonism.

There are views and groups in this world who are hostile to each other because they misunderstand each other or treated each other badly at some point. But there are other views and groups who are not hostile because of misunderstandings or maltreatment but rather because they understand each other only too well. The centuries-long conflict between Christianity and Islam is like that.

Yes, I acknowledge that we worship the same God. People who refuse to admit that are simply living in denial. But Who God is: there we fundamentally- fundamentally!- disagree.

Jesus brings this stark difference home. Even if we were to accept what Islam accepts- that He is merely a Prophet (though a great one)- we are confronted by something. Islam says (from what my student told me) that Jesus ascended before the crucifixion, and that God miraculously caused another man to look like Jesus, and it was he who was crucified in Jesus' place- and, moreover, stayed dead. Even, as I say, if we accept that Jesus was a Prophet of God, what kind of Prophet is this, and what kind of God does he represent? This Prophet takes the easy way out. He lets a (possibly innocent) third party suffer for him. God colludes with this and brings it about through miraculous means.

This sticks in my throat, not only because it seems to me unjust, but because it goes against the grain of all that has come before. Sure, there are parts of the Torah and parts of the Tradition where the message is that God will make His people victorious, that they will triumph over their enemies, that if they follow His law all will be well for them and they will prosper. But these are balanced (sometimes outweighed) by other parts, where God takes the part of the downtrodden, where He takes pity on the alien, the widow, the orphan. It flies in the face of the experience of His prophets before Jesus: Moses, who never enjoyed the fruit of his long labours but died on Mt Nebo unsatisfied, Isaiah who was sawn in two, Jeremiah who went from misery to misery and was given a mysterious sharing in the suffering of God Himself. Then (says Islam) along comes Jesus, who gets whisked out of harm's way in the nick of time, lest anything bad happen to him, and some random gets it in the neck instead. It doesn't match.

And what kind of God is this anyway? This is a God for winners only, a God who sides always with the victor against the defeated, a God of the rich, a God of the intelligentsia, the bourgeoisie and the upper echelons. For this God suffering and poverty are signs of condemnation.

How different is the Gospel to this? In Christianity, God does not take the easy way out. He enters into suffering, pain, grief, loneliness, loss and death. He drinks all of human anguish and He drinks it to the dregs. He takes no shortcuts, enacts no Deus ex machina. He suffers. He dies. God dies. And then He rises, by His own power, and takes all with Him (or will, at any rate). For this God stands in communion with Man, redeems him from where he is, by being what he is and experiencing what he experiences. This God knows misery intimately. This God knows pain. This God knows what it is to be wronged, to be sinned against, to experience malice and evil. This God knows loneliness and abandonment and mortality.

This is a God worlds away from one Who smiles and sympathises only with the rich, fortunate and powerful. This God loves the powerless, the poor, the miserable, the suffering, the dying and the dead. He has Himself been one of them.

And we are asked to follow Him. Not just follow Him as a teacher, but follow Him where He went. That means we are supposed to suffer, be lonely, be poor, be miserable and powerless. And only to the extent that we are can we say that we are like Him. His thoughts are higher than our thoughts and His ways higher than ours (Isaiah 55:9), precisely because lower. He dives deeper than we dare. Where we instinctively desire self-aggrandisement, He abases Himself. Where we hunger to be full, He empties Himself. It is on the Cross that God has delivered the most complete revelation of Himself. We shrink from lack, from loss, from loneliness, bankruptcy, dishonour and humiliation. But it is in those places that we see and know God most completely. It is in those places that He is to be found by those who seek Him. It is in those places that we really come to understand and know Who God is, Who Jesus Christ is.

How easily we miss the significance of this. Humiliation is just as divine as glory and honour. Obedience just as divine as authority. Impotence just as divine as omnipotence.

All our gains must be regarded as loss (Phil 3:7-8), as excrement, in fact (which is what scubola means in that verse). This is no idle saying. We must take it seriously if we are to be His disciples. A paradigm shift is required, against which every fibre of our being rebels and revolts (My ways are higher than your ways). I may have many good things. These indeed may be blessings, and perfectly legitimate goods in which there is no hint of illor temptation or sin. But precisely because they are good and legitimate pleasures, they stand between me and the God revealed in Christ Jesus. For in Christ Jesus, we must give things up to receive them. He always gives them back (though not necessarily in this life), but we must give them up first, and without expecting them back.

The God revealed in Christ Jesus works through the Church throughout history and we see His mark on all things. When Christ died, He won victory over evil, sin, death and suffering and rose to a life that was greater than that in which He died. Likewise, when the Church has sought temporal goods, when things have looked favourable for her, she has tended to lose sight of her Saviour and God. But when she has been oppressed, downtrodden, discriminated against and forces have arrayed against her to destroy her utterly, then she has mirrored Him and been victorious. And new and greater life has emerged- a risen life (or a glimpse of it) to share with the risen Lord. Two recent cases. Post-Revolution French Christianity was dynamic, sent missionaries across the earth and brought forth dozens of saints, one of whom is incorrupt and another of whom is now a Doctor of the Church. Secondly, the post-Soviet Church in Russia is now going from strength to strength, from what I hear. A quote I found some years ago in a history text on Soviet Russia from one of the government officials sums it up: "[Christianity] is like a nail; the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes into the wood."

The Church, like her Lord (and this goes for the individual Christian as well), wins by losing. She is victorious only through defeat. Through His shed blood we have redemption; in losing our life, we find it; through defeat and suffering we conquer. Our soldiers are martyrs, and their blood is the seed of the Church. For she imitates her Saviour. Her life is cruciform. And so must mine and yours be.